


Hope, Heart, Home

by VigilantShadow



Series: Tales From The Lodge [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone: Amnesty (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, open-ended, vaguely stream of consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 14:37:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17061626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VigilantShadow/pseuds/VigilantShadow
Summary: At some point, Thacker had resigned himself to dying in The Corrupted Lands.Or:How Thacker became an Abomination.





	Hope, Heart, Home

**Author's Note:**

> Forewarning:  
> This fic came to me when I was taking a nap and I wrote the entire thing on my Iphone notepad while half asleep.  
> If it's not coherent uhhhhhhhhhh....................sorry.

Thacker knew he was going to die in The Corrupted Lands.

In the first year of his wandering, Thacker had tried his best to hold onto hope he’d get out alive, because his expedition into the wastelands was meant to _give_ hope, at the end of the day. To give The Pine Guard and the people at the Lodge and even the sylphs who had never met him and didn’t want to some hope that this cycle might end before it killed them all.

Well, on his good days he believed it was about hope. That was the most altruistic of his motivations, and if he was going to die he might as well die as someone with at least one virtue left.

On his bad days, Thacker admitted to himself that he had come here to gather information. He tried to justify it as important to the safety of the world, but even that felt like a hollow excuse. In truth, it had been a long time since he’d had the energy for things like wanting to save the world. Really, Thacker just wanted to feel competent researching abominations again, instead of like he was doomed to always be wrong-footed and caught off guard. Always coming up with the answer too late to stop things from going wrong. Mama still had her strength, and Barclay his gentle loyalty, but all of Thacker’s wits had been rendered useless by...everything. Trying to find weaknesses was pointless when there were none, and no matter how much Mama and Barclay reassured him that he was still an important member of the team the futility of it all kept him up at night.

At this point his wits wouldn’t be able to make him an important part of the team when...if he got back, no matter how much insight he gained. They had been failing him more and more lately, and his hope along with them, as the harsh sunlight ate at his skin and he tasted sand with every breath. He was not hungry, or thirsty, just tired, and the exhaustion cut into the well-ordered patterns of his thoughts. The sun set and rose around him, from different angles every day, and he was never going to get home.

He wrote that thought down in his notebook. He had a feeling it might have come out as nonsense, as all his writings did when he reviewed them at the end of the day, but what did it matter? No one was going to read these pages. It was just that writing in his notebook was as natural as breathing, as reading an old tome until three in the morning, then half waking up as Barclay tried to pry the book out of his hands without disturbing him. He put a stop to that thought. Well, he still had his notebook at least.

There was a noise in the distance, like bells and flutes and life and death at once. Thacker snapped his notebook shut. The parts of his self-preservation that sounded like Barclay and Mama told him to run. He was going to die in The Corrupted Lands though, and so instead he took a step forward. 

As he got closer to it the music shifted, and he realized it was not instruments at all but voices. They hummed and sang and cried out, louder and louder until they felt almost like they were inside his head.

“We could be,” they murmured in his ear, and despite their quietness they thrummed in his chest like when Mike used to turn the bass on his boombox up too far up while they waited for Pine Guard meetings to start. Back when Mike was still alive. He swallowed that grief and the sand in his throat.

“Why would I want that?” He asked. His voice croaked like it sometimes did when he had just woken up.

“You are curious,” they said, “and we know things. Will you listen?”

“I suppose I can try,” he said, because what else was there to do for a researcher trapped in the desert except listen to strange disembodied voices?

“Sylvain is dying,” they trilled around him. He opened his mouth to ask what they meant, but the voices answered before he could. “They take, and they take, and they take. They are so desperate to live that they will kill themselves on the spear of their resolve.”

A hot wind picked up around him, moulding the sand into the shape of a crystal, and figures danced into existence around it. They clawed at the crystal, dug into it until there was nothing left and it crumbled into nothing.

“Are you saying the sylphs are destroying their own world, somehow?” He heard no words, but the wind shifting around him told him he was right. “Well, I know the emissary between the humans and the sylphs. If you can tell me more about what you mean, help me get home, I can-“

“They will not listen to you. They have to listen to us.” The hot wind brushed his cheek appraisingly.

“Well, then why don’t you go to them?” He asked, though something in the edge of the voices gave him the feeling he knew the answer.

“We have, we have. Every month we have sent out the echoes of ourselves to try and make them understand. None have returned, so it must be that none have listened. But you, you have a mouth, have a voice. We can put your clever words to use, and they will hear us.”

Well, shit.

“You’re where the abominations come from, aren’t you?” He supposed this was his own fault, really. He’d come here to find the source of the abominations, and now here they were. The voices didn’t answer, and for a moment there was only the chime-flute-rustle which had drawn him to them.

Then, for the first time since he had arrived, clouds fell over the sun. Godrays spilled out in the space between them, and the glow of them stitched itself into a being of light. It tilted its head to the side. He could feel himself being watched, despite the lack of eyes.

“We are here to help. We are here to save Sylvain. They will cut out its heart and eat it.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do what you’re asking me to.” Or what he thought they were asking him to. Maybe their intentions weren’t as horrifying as the theory weaving into place in his mind, but the intensity of their stare told him he was right. Maybe he did still have his wits left after all.

“We are sorry.” They did not sound sorry.

The wind grew stronger, blowing the sand about him into a frenzy which forced him to shut his mouth and close his eyes. He felt a hand cup his chin, soft and soothing even as the sand around him cut into every inch of exposed skin. He clawed at the hand, but the light burned the tips of his fingers and the grip did not yield.

“Do not be afraid,” the light said, voice clear even over the storm, “we will go home when we are done. You will go home when we are done.” He wondered if there was any chance they’d actually succeed. There was no point in wondering, he knew there wasn’t. He loved Mama, knew she loved him, knew that what kept the three members of The Pine Guard alive was that they would all die to protect one another and so knew they’d have to stay safe to stop that from happening.

But one of the reasons he loved Mama was her resolve, and he feared and hoped that this thing wearing his face wouldn’t stop her. The hand trailed down his neck, fingers brushing his collarbone and then grabbing the fabric above the Pine Guard badge sewn into the inner lining of his jacket. A moment passed before he smelled burning cotton, and his thoughts grew muggy with that rage Barclay had warned him about. It was kept at bay, however, as he felt that burning continue into his skin, the hand touching his chest and then passing into it. The singing-crying-screaming voice around him grew louder, and louder, until he felt he might go deaf.

And then it was silent. The wind vanished, and the sand dropped back down quietly. He throat itched. He wished he was dead.

“We wish to save Sylvain,” the voices chorused in his head, “please, let us save Sylvain.” They were not asking him. This was not a request but a benediction, and one which repeated over and over again, pressing down on him until he couldn’t breathe. His thoughts scattered apart under their chiming voices, and all he had left was feeling. It was that same feeling which had driven him to join the Pine Guard, that mix of curiosity and a drive to do _something_ to help which sometimes frightened him in its intensity, though he could not tell who it was meant to help. The voices prodded at it and then their volume dimmed to something which he could almost stand. They curled around what was left of him, gentle again.

“Show me,” he managed to whisper through a parched throat. “Show me what you want to do.” They hummed their gratefulness, and the flood gates opened. He was the voices, the voices were him. Their memories trickled through his synapses like too-cold water and the glimpses he saw fascinated him. He wished he could pore over them all but he was so, so tired, and so instead he let himself sink below the river of them. He slept.

* * *

 

He dreamt of what must be Sylvain, vibrant and loud, a sun-bright crystal beating like a heart at the center of everything.

He woke and saw only the desert. The wind sighed against his skin and he let go again.

He dreamt, and saw the heart beating slower, flickering orange.

He woke and saw a coal-black stone of the same shape as that heart. The sandstorm whipped around it. Burying it, protecting it.

He dreamt and saw the gate open, close, open, close. Faster and faster. Pulsing like the crystal, like his head did when he floated to the surface and saw through the voices’ eyes. His eyes. He’d forgotten they were his eyes.

He woke and felt strong hands on his shoulder, smelled that earthy smell which felt like home. Home, the voices chimed. He saw the desert, he saw what the desert had been, saw Sylvain, saw the Lodge. 

He slept, and dreamt that Mama was carrying him home.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I like to think of the old PG as being another MOTW team, but all of them used up all their luck points. Including Thacker. Especially Thacker.


End file.
